Greatest Easy Listening Songs of All Time

 

Comments

[Lee_K]

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss... What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?"

-- Nick Hornby, from his brilliant book (and later movie) High Fidelity

Easy Listening Radio is one of the prime examples of how the vital music that came out of the 60s was destroyed by the industry that professed to be its lifeline. The music for ELR was chosen only because people tired of Muzak (dentist office/elevator music), so mellow pop songs were used instead. But there was no intelligence brought to this genre, only that the music was low key -- no highs or lows -- and nothing very controversial. Elvis Costello railed about this phenomenon in his song "Radio, Radio" and Kurt Cobain's whole grunge revolution started with their absolute distaste for what broadcast radio and the music industry had become.

What happened to truly gifted DJs like Alison Steele of WNEW, who would play Iron Butterfly's 23 minute "In-A- Gadda-Da-Vida" when the mood struck her? Everything was replaced by safe playlists of songs meant not to offend and maximize advertising revenue. And don't get me started on Classic Rock stations that played "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Stairway to Heaven" so many times that they hollowed out their value and made us cringe as we heard them played for the 500th time.

[herculodge]

I could not have said it better. In San Francisco in the 70s, Y93 FM tried to play good music, like Roxy Music, but it turned into an easy listening station.